In the first few decades of commercial television broadcasting, viewers were provided with a limited selection of broadcast programming on a handful, at best, of over-the-air channels. Broadcasters and advertisers quickly discovered that viewers could be depended on to suffer through a great many annoying, repetitive, shouting, and sometimes insulting commercial interruptions before they were irritated enough to rise out of their chairs, walk over to the set and attempt to tune the receiver to another channel. And the effort was not likely to be rewarded since other channels' programming was often equally annoying. It is not surprising that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minnow observed in his address to Congress in 1961 that commercial broadcast television had come to resemble a “vast wasteland.” Viewers seemed destined to put up with it.
By the mid 1980's however, modern remote controllable phase lock loop tuning systems provided viewers with the ability to effortlessly sequence through the channels at the touch of a button. The balance had shifted in favor of the viewer and so called “channel surfing” soon became widespread. Now, even the slightest annoyance could provoke viewers to jump channels. Increasingly, viewers subscribed to broadband cable or satellite broadcast systems, lured by the promise of finding better programming in the hundreds of channels of broadcast content.
Although viewers are no longer captive to a limited selection of channels, they have discovered that having access to a vast number of channels provides no assurance they will easily find something worth watching. If anything, the amount of bandwidth devoted to commercials has increased disproportionately with the number of channels, and some broadcasters have resorted to increased violence and lurid sexual content in an effort to ensnare an increasingly impatient and fragmented audience. As a result, viewers find themselves navigating through broadcast content that is qualitatively still a “vast wasteland” as before, but on a much grander scale. Moreover, some broadcasters have begun anticompetitive programming practices in order to discourage channel surfing, such as synchronizing the start of commercial segments with those of other channels and heavy rotation or simultaneous broadcast of the same commercials on multiple channels. While such practices may discourage channel surfing to some extent, they also prevent viewers from discovering that they might prefer a competing channels' programs because synchronized commercials are always running when the viewer changes channels.
Although some viewers have resorted to prerecording favorite programs in order to skip over annoying and offensive content during playback, many viewers would still prefer the spontaneous and random discovery opportunities afforded by channel surfing if the level of annoyance could be kept to a minimum.